What is a Community Organizer?

With the candidacy and election of Barack Obama, there has been unprecedented attention to this job title over the past 18 months. Sarah Palin implied that a communty orgnizer was an activist without "real responsibilities." This week NPR featured a Marvin Rogers, a young, African-American and self proclaimed community organizer trying to build a political career as a southern black Republican. He defines an organizer this way: "A community organizer is this: When you don't have groceries and you can't feed your kid, when your house burns down and you don't have any place to go, the person that you call is a community organizer."

Rogers seems to do great work with young people in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but he is no community organizer. Public speaker? Yes. Activist? Yes. Youth Mentor? Yes. Community organizer? No. Not even close.

What's a community organizer? I have worked, trained and reflected on community organizing as a profession for over 20 years and am still not content with my "elevator speech" answer to this question, but I know it includes the following:

From Mike Green and Henry Moore:
COs bring together people and groups in a community to act on what they care about - often people without power to grow and develop their power to act

COs are the staff of a community partnership (community being the operative word) and accountable to that partnership.

COs assist people in discovering and activating their own leadership gifts, forming a leaders group and helping the group bring community members into relationship with each other for action.

COs engage the gifts of community members and challenge leaders to empower a wider and wider partnership of people and associations into engagement and action.

From John McKnight:
COs are about getting other people to do it. ("it" being solve problems and address communty issues and "other people" being ourselves, not the organizer)

From Ernie Cortes:
Organizing is a fancy word for relationship building.

COs identify, test out, teach, train and develop leadership, which then builds relationships and networks, which then organize and reorganize communities.

COs don't sell an idea, but they listen for self-interest and dreams. Then they kindle imagination, stir possibilities, propose ways to act on dreams, visions and values. They DO NOT own the cause or the organization. If they do, they are not organizers and the people they work with have nothing.

From Bill Moyers:
COs teach people how to take up their own cause and take effective action on the things that affect them most immediately. They "summon people to citizenship" and to participation in the public square

From Mary Beth Rogers:
COs teach and train people to practice citizenship - meaning to act and participate in the world. The operate from the premise that a "citizen" is someone who can act effectively, personally and politically, because he or she understands the uses and misuses of power -- and its sources.

So maybe the elevator speech is this: A community organizer is someone who works for a community to teach them how to practice democracy at the most local level.